“National meetings” were just a place for corporate men to hook up with lower level women. After being diagnosed with endometriosis, I was at work during a visit from a corporate area manager. I was in extreme pain and he told me I need to “smile more” to him. Even after explaining to him what I was going through, he still told me to try harder to smile while at work. Women are seen as objects who need to dress for men and not for themselves.
Corporate would perform regular check ups on the centers but it wasn’t to see how people were enjoying their job or to see how things were being run by their terrible managers. It was to make us perform in front of them exactly how we do our job every day to make sure we were following their exact script. One time I was so sick that I didn’t have a voice. I wanted to call out but I knew that if I did, there would be hell to pay so I went in hoping they would notice just how sick I was and tell me to go home but instead they gave me a cough drop and some water and told me to still perform the script WITH NO VOICE. If you call out sick, they never trust that you actually are sick and the managers will voice it to the entire staff. They only care about working you as hard as they can. In the 6 years I worked there I probably called out sick 4 times and each time I was told that I was only sick because I was doing too much on the weekends. Which was not true and none of their business.
I had the highest numbers in my center and in my region and they knew I was good at my job because they continuously gave me more and more responsibilities. I was a specialist at every solution hair club had to offer, a supervisor and a trainer. With all of this responsibility and exceptional performance, you would think they would incentivize better but instead, they find loopholes on how to not pay you. When I told them I felt as though I had too much responsibility (more than the managers) and that I would like either a raise or to step down, they told me they would not give me a raise and that I could step down and take a pay cut (of over $5/hour) to what the STARTING stylists were making after 6 years of employment. So they basically forced me to stay my position.
My manager, had me serve her husband with divorce papers on my day off because. If you don’t become buddies with the managers, they will make your life hell and write you up for anything they can find. This manager in particular, picks on people she feels threatened by and she is not an advocate for female empowerment. She was beyond rude to employees that spoke English as a second language. She has been working in this job since high school and it showed. She was the same age as me and would call me “hunny” and talk down to me and every other employee. This manager jumped from job to job all over the country with the company and had several complaints to HR. Their solution was to just keep moving her around instead of realizing she was was the problem. When she moved to our center, over half the staff quit in a year.
The management keeps notes where they can write whatever they want about their employees but when employees raise concern over management, they are brushed off.
The managers and area managers have no business managing people. Most of them have been with the company forever and have worked their way up from receptionist positions by making friends but not by being qualified. Most of them don’t have a college degree or previous experience.
They give dress codes to the stylists but not to anyone else. They want sales people to dress “sexy” because that is what they think sells. We had an amazing sales person with great numbers who sold with love and compassion. Her clients loved her but she was constantly being reprimanded because her hair wasn’t curled to the managers liking.
Yes, there are a lot of females that work there but that is because it is the hair and beauty industry which tends to be a female dominated field. It does not mean that the females are treated as well as the males or that they have the same opportunities. I saw less qualified males gets jobs in corporate over females, constantly.
